The first time I saw the Big Lebowski, I was a very high teenager watching it through the glass of a smoking area. Notably, there was no sound. It was a heck of a way to see the movie for the first time.
Is the NY Post some kind of National Enquirer analogue? This article reads like it was written by a grade school child trying to emulate the voice of an villainous news reporter.
Except one is an employee and the other one is an ex employee. The bias this introduces is not just a minor nuance, it's what fuels the public conflict and causes everybody else to double check their popcorn reserves.
Of course technical discussions happen all the time at companies between competent people. But you don't do that in public, nor is this a technical debate: "I don't recall talking to you about it" - "I do, I did xyz then you ignored me" - "<changes subject>"
Important distinction yes. It also means I can't go back and check the thread on what was said and when. Nor do I want to.
Always good to talk face to face if you're have strong feelings about something. When I said "talk" I meant literally face to face.
Spending a decade or so on lkml, everyone develops a thick skin. But mix it with the corporate environment, Facebook 2011, being an ex-employee adds more to the drama.
Having read through the comments here, I'm still of the opinion that any HW changes had a secondary effect and the primary contributor was a change in how HHVM/jemalloc interacted with MADV.
One more suggestion: evaluate more than one app and company wide profiling data to make such decisions.
One of the challenges in doing so is the large contingent of people who don't have an understanding of CPU uarch/counters and yet have a negative opinion of their usefulness to make decisions like this.
So the only tool you have left with is to run large scale rack level tests in a close to prod env, which has its own set of problems and benefits.
Perf counters are only indicative of certain performance characteristics at the uarch level but when one improves one or more aspects of it the result does not necessarily positively correlate to the actual measurable performance gains in E2E workloads deployed on a system.
That said, one of the comments above suggests that the HW change was a switch to Ivy Bridge, when zeroing memory became cheaper, which is a bit unexpected (to me). So you might be more right when you say that the improvement was the result of memory allocation patterns and jemalloc.
We should call the fake stick "NAM" for "no access memory." Then you can tell your kids that they couldn't possibly understand, man, because they weren't _there_.
Or DMZBR, for "dedicated mass zero buffer ram". 4, 8, or 16 gigabyte sticks of the finest zeroes on Earth! Now you don't have to reuse the same zeroes over and over! Reduces wear and tear on your zeroes!
If you compose a text of enough references and (well-known) in-jokes, and get the perplexity/burstiness stats right, you too can reliably produce text that the AI-detectors think is inhuman. I suspect that doesn't work so well for the latest-generation AI-detection systems (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103465), but there's definitely a way to fool those, too.
Look man, people are going to talk they way they talk. Just let them do it and deal with it for God's sake.
This reminds me of a front-page post a little while ago where someone wrote how much it stressed them out when people routinely apologized for delayed responses. Get over it.
I also sometimes wonder if folks writing these articles have had to work closely with people from culturally different places. I've had coworkers that literally could not be direct if their life depended on it for that reason, and I learned to deal with it.
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